The Best Looking New Bars

Hong Kong’s bar scene never sits still. There’s always some cool new bar to look forward to. As well as fantastic drinks, many of the city’s newest bars are increasingly good to look at – gloomy dive bars simply don’t exist when real estate is as expensive as it is in Hong Kong. If you’re looking for a stylish Instagram to go with your drink, let us show you the best new bars for just that.

The Artist House

A recent addition to Causeway Bay’s Fashion Walk, The Artist House is a hipster’s dream: part beer bar, part coffee house. The space itself is gorgeous. It’s sleek and uncluttered – heavy on wood panelling and exposed brick – maintaining a nice balance of rustic, intimate and cool. The clouds hovering just below the ceiling add a quirky, cute touch ideal for a photo.

Room 309 is a cocktail haven hidden within The Pottinger hotel. Windowless, with suppressed lighting and candles that barely touch the dark, richly decorated interior, Room 309 does bring to mind some Victorian-era alchemist’s den. As well as the décor, equally aesthetically pleasing are the signature ‘crystal’ cocktails – transparent versions of standards like an Old Fashioned.

Search among the dusty antique stalls of Upper Lascar Row to discover new arrival Blue Supreme. A stylish beer bar with a focus on suds from Belgium – not to mention an excellent kitchen – the dark teal walls, wooden furniture and sense of space created by the high ceiling and floor-to-ceiling windows all generate a particularly inviting ambience.

Housed inside Tai Kwun – the former Central Police Station, Central Magistracy and Victoria Prison compound and Hong Kong’s largest conservation project to date – Behind Bar sits within one of the site’s old prison blocks. Admittedly, it’s relatively small and narrow, but the funky neon lighting and the seating within prison cells make this one of the coolest openings of 2018.

Another Tai Kwun hotspot, Dragonfly arrived in Hong Kong courtesy of designer Ashley Sutton, a man responsible for the design behind a number of Hong Kong’s most stylish bars and restaurants, from Dear Lilly to J. Boroski to Iron Fairies. This time out, Sutton’s inspiration is 19th-century American designer Louis Comfort Tiffany. With a ceiling covered in art nouveau-style lamps patterned like dragonfly wings and a giant humanoid dragonfly presiding over the bar area, this is one of the most eye-catching openings of the year.

Although it opened in early 2018, PDT remains one of the best looking bars to have opened all year. Much is modelled on the famous original in New York: the entrance is a mock phone booth, the walls are decorated with dressed up taxidermied animals and there’s swish wooden panelling on the ceiling. A surprisingly cosy space, this is an ideal place to hunker down with a drink and bask in the warm surrounds.

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